A Visit to The Met

So Cindy and I ended up going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday, and I just felt all wrong. First of all, it was incredibly crowded. It seems like every time I go to a museum it's ten times more crowded than the least time, leading me to believe that there really is a cultural crisis upon us, and our society is like a sinking ocean liner, and the museums are the last remaining part of the boat sticking up above the water and everyone is congregating there like rats. Or else, this bad economy business really is a scam.

Unfortunately, I just got in a worse and worse mood as the day went along. The museum started to feel to me like the world's largest and tackiest thrift store. Or those times when you go to a thrift store and don't see one thing you want to buy and just get depressed about all the crap people have owned but no one wants. I started to feel like I was unable anymore to keep perpetuating this lie that any of this art is at all good. The only thing any of it ever accomplished was to survive. And maybe what future dead artists should invest in is a lot of plastic containers and waterproof tape, or even lead containers. Your art will survive future generations simply because it was all that was left after the earth was made uninhabitable. And even if a few people do make it into the future somehow, digital files sure aren't going to. Maybe I should get back my typewriter.

Finally, however, before staggering out into the park, we looked at this little suite of rooms all the way in the back of the museum directly behind a kind of sunken lounge that looks like it could be an abandoned 1980's food court in the atrium of a downtown Indianapolis bank complex. These few rooms were there, apparently, to exhibit some of the Robert Lehman collection in a unique, intimate setting that reminded me of a movie whorehouse—or perhaps the offices of Ernest Angley Ministries in Akron, Ohio. There were no people AT ALL back there, and the light was low, windows cracked, vines coming through the wall like the park wanted to take back its rightful space. This was the Met's secret museum! And the paintings here were the best I'd seen, so I've included some pictures. You'll recognize Rembrandt's famous "Dog Face Larry"— but unfortunately I don't remember the names or the painters of the other two: the "surreal landscape with dead trees and an old guy" and my very favorite, the Lynchian "stern woman who won't sit in the chair in a much too large empty space." So for all my complaining, after all, I left the museum inspired!

Depressing

I’m back to work after a nice weekend and I feel that usual Monday feeling that is so much worse because it’s so common. I feel like a complete failure in every way. Mostly because I feel boring. There are people working in crappy, dreadful jobs, but they have some kind of vital quality or unique quirkiness, even on bad days, and even on Mondays. Those people are my heroes.

The good thing is I had a delivery today, just an envelope to an office across town, but it was walking, and took about an hour round trip. Then I walked around for an hour at lunch. Any day I can walk for two hours is a good day.

I’m going to go home and try to work on writing in about an hour. Most days I try and most days I fail. We’ll see about this one.

Googlle

Like every other morning of my life I woke up, turned on the computer, firefox, and the basic Google page so I could, first thing, search for the things I had dreams/nightmares about. (On this particular day it was the spelling of the name: "Jeffrey.") But something caught my eye: Google had two l's! Googlle. Of course Google likes to do this from time to time, change the logo for a day, commemorating something, and usually you can pass the cursor over the logo and it will tell you what it is. (The other day the logo looked like either a hairball or a crushed pastry, and I can't remember what that one was about.) To my relief, it was just about Google's 11th birthday. (It wasn't actually two l's, it was the number 11.)

Still, I felt shaken. Please don't do that to me. I want to open my basic Google page and see the primary colors, the big white page, the familiar font logo. Seeing the word "Googlle" is like going out to your car and having it say Cheevy, or Furd. That's the first comparison that came to my mind, even though I don't own a car. And this got me thinking about a lot of things, like the relationship of the automobile in our culture to the internet, suburbs in postwar United States and comparing them to our present day "virtual suburbs", and comparisons of God and Google. Which led me to think about the Ten Commandments, and realizing I don't even know what the Ten Commandments are, or their origin. Thinking about moving to a remote location with no internet and instead a sizable library of actual books. And finally, thinking about this new online journal I wanted to start.

All of this before my first cup of coffee. This is the beginning of my Sunday, when I should be working on correcting my manuscript. Or I should be resting. Or I should be watching NFL football. I just can't get into NFL football, though, I just don't like it. I'm having trouble caring much about baseball, either. I can't seem to rest on Sunday, yet I can't seem to get anything done. I'm worried about the internet the way people in post-World War ll United States should have been worried about automobiles and the suburbs. I feel like I'm lucky to even have these things to worry about, and not bigger concerns at the moment. Maybe I need to go to church today. Or maybe an art museum.